The Old Testament
The Old Testament was written some two thousand years before the
invention of printing. It was written it Hebrew, a language composed entirely of
consonants, without any points or marks indicating or standing for vowels, so that
anything like accuracy was impossible. This could be tested if we write an English
sentence leaving out the vowels. It would take far more inspiration to read than to write
a book with consonants alone.
The books
comprising the Old Testament were not divided into chapters or verses, and no system of
punctuation was known. Furthermore there was no dictionary of the Hebrew language and thus
the accurate meaning of the words could not be preserved.
The Old
Testament was printed for the first time in 1488. Until this date it existed in
manuscripts and was thus constantly exposed to erasures and additions. It is admitted by
the most learned men in the Hebrew language, that the present English version of the Old
Testament contains at least one hundred thousand
errors!
It is not known for certain who in fact wrote any of the books of the
Old Testament. For instance, it is now generally conceded that Moses was not the author of
the Pentateuch. Other books, not in existence now, are referred to in the Old Testament as
of equal authority, such as the books of Jasher, Nathan, Ahijah, Iddo, Jehu, and sayings
of the Seers.
Christians themselves are in disagreement as to what books are
inspired. The Catholics claim as inspired the books of Macabees, Tobit, Esdras, etc.
Others doubt the inspiration of Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon. The latter
two books do not mention the name of God, nor is reference made to any supreme being, nor
to any religious duty. These omissions lay the books open to doubts regarding their divine
teachings.
The fact that language is continually changing, that words are
constantly dying and others being born; that the same word has a variety of meanings
during its life, shows how hard it is to preserve the original ideas that might have been
expressed in the scriptures for thousands of years without dictionaries, without the art
of printing, and without the light of contemporaneous literature.
The
manuscripts of the Old Testament were not alike, and the Greek version differed from the
Hebrew, and there was no absolutely received text of the Old Testament until after the
commencement of the Christian era. Marks and points to denote vowels were invented in the
7th century after Christ. Whether these vowels were put in the proper places or
not is still an open question.
The
Alexandrian version, or what is known as the Septuagint, translated by seventy learned
Jews, assisted by “miraculous power” about two hundred years before Christ,
could not have been, it is said, translated from the Hebrew text that we now have. The
difference can only be accounted for by supposing that they had a different Hebrew text.
The early Christian churches adopted the Septuagint and were satisfied for a time. But so
many errors were found and so many were scanning every word in search of something to
sustain their peculiar view, that several new versions appeared, all somewhat different
from the Hebrew manuscripts from the Septuagint, and from each other. All these versions
were in Greek.
The first Latin Bible originated in Africa, but no one has ever found
out which Latin manuscript was the original. Many were produced, and all differed from
each other. These Latin versions were compared with each other and with the Hebrew, and a
new Latin version was made in the fifth century, but the old Latin versions held their own
for about four hundred years, and no one yet knows which were right. Besides these, there
were Egyptian, Ethiopian, and several others, all differing from each other as well as
from all others in the world.
It was not
until the 14th century that the Bible was translated into German, and not until
the 15th century that Bibles were printed in the principal languages of Europe.
Of these Bibles there were several kinds – Luther’s, the Dort, King James’s,
Genevan, French, besides the Danish and Swedish. Most of these differed from each other,
and gave rise to infinite disputes and crimes without number. The earliest fragment of the
Bible in the “Saxon” language known to exist was written some time in the 7th
century. The first Bible was printed in England in 1538. In 1560 the first English Bible
was printed that was divided into verses. Under Henry VIII, the Bible was revised; again
under Queen Elizabeth, and once again under King James. The last was published in 1611,
and is the one now in general use.
The New Testament.
There are in
existence manuscripts of the Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Latin and other versions. Until
recently the Vatican Codex (in Rome) and the Sinaitic Codex (formerly in Leningrad, except
a few leaves in Leipzig, and now in the British Museum) were the oldest known manuscripts;
they go back to the early 4th century. Next to them in antiquity are the
Alexandrian Codex (in the British Museum), the Codex Ephraemi (in Paris), and the Codex
Bezae (in Cambridge); the first two of these date from the 5th century, and the
third from the 6th century. The Codex Bezae presents a number of peculiarities,
and has readings not found in any other Greek manuscript, including the story of the man
whom Jesus found working on the Sabbath.
When the
Authorized Version was drawn up by James I’s conference of learned theologians at
Hampton Court in 1611, only quite late manuscripts were available to them for translation.
The Hampton Court divines followed the Textus
Receptus (“Received Text”) which had been prepared by Erasmus of Rotterdam
after extensive manuscript collation in the previous century. The Vatican Codex lay
unknown to English scholars in the Papal Library. The Alexandrian Codex did not become
accessible to scholars of Western Europe before the reign of Charles I, to whom it was
presented by Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople. It was not until the 19th
century that Tischendorf discovered the Sinaitic Codex. Eminent scholars, mostly members
of the Church of England, consulted these and other valuable manuscripts and were
responsible for the Revised Version (1881-1885), a version that has never been popular and
provoked charges of sacrilege and blasphemy. A comparison of the two versions shows that
the New Testament, as we have it, contains many interpolations as well as alterations of
the original text affecting Christian dogma, sayings of Jesus and episodes of his life.
The text about the Three Witnesses (the Comma Johanneum = “Johannine
Section” 1 John v, 7), a famous proof text of the dogma of Trinity, is omitted from the Revised Version. No Greek
manuscript earlier than 15th century possesses it; the Greek and the African
Fathers knew nothing of it, nor did Jerome, the author of the Vulgate. The earliest to
quote it was a Western theologian, Priscillian (late 4th century), the first
Christian to suffer death at the hands of Christian rulers for his heretical beliefs. The
Revisers did not venture to omit Mark xvi, 9-20, but drew attention in a note to its
dubious authenticity. This passage is absent from the Sinaitic Codex, from the Old Syriac,
from nine of the older Armenian manuscripts, and also from the Codex Vercellensis –
the oldest Latin manuscript.
Other manuscripts have a shorter and
quite different ending for Mark. Stylistic and other variations from the rest of this
Gospel here betray themselves.
The
impressive story of the woman taken in adultery, which now forms part of John viii, is also queried by the Revisers. Most
Greek manuscripts omit it, while some place it at the end of the Fourth Gospel, and others
after Luke xxi, 38; it
certainly fits badly in its present context.
To sum up:
the Bible consists, apart from the Apocrypha (which is accepted by some and rejected by
others), of sixty-six books by various authors. The authorship of these books is disputed.
There is no agreement between Catholics and Protestants as to what constitutes Biblical
Canon; as to what books may be accepted as canonical.
The Catholic
version includes some of the apocryphal books, but not all. Generally speaking,
Protestants reject all apocryphal books as non-canonical though they may read and study
them. In its sixth Article, the Church of England says of the apocryphal books that “the
church doth read them for example of the life and instruction of manners but yet doth it
not apply them to establish any doctrine.”
The term
“apocrypha” is generally applied to certain books of the Old Testament supposed
to have been written between Malachi and Matthew.
A well-known
authority on the sources of the Bible, Dr. J. Patterson Smyth, B. D., LL. D, writes in his
book “HOW WE GOT OUR BIBLE” as
follows: “Now let us remember clearly that as we look into that old Record Chest of
nearly 1800 years ago, we have before us all the sources from which we get our Bible. And
remember further that these writings were of course manuscripts i.e. written by the hand,
and that copies when needed, had each to be written out, letter by letter, at a great
expense of time and trouble, and unfortunately, I must add, very often too at some expense
of the original correctness. However careful the scribe might be, it was almost impossible
in copying a long and difficult manuscript, to prevent the occurrence of errors. Sometimes
he would mistake one letter for another, sometimes, if having the manuscript read to him,
he would confound two words of similar sounds – sometimes after writing in the last
word of a line, on looking up again his eye would catch the same word at the end of the
next line, and he would go on from that, omitting the whole line between. Remarks and
explanations, too, written in the margin might sometimes in transcribing get inserted in
the text. In these and various other ways errors might creep into the copy of his
manuscript. These errors would be repeated by the men that afterward copied from this, who
would also sometimes add other errors of his own. So that it is evident, as copies
increased, the errors would be likely to increase with them.” (Pages 10-11).
“Therefore
we are able to detect faults even in our almost perfect Authorized Version – mistakes
here and there which scholars have known of for some time past; verses where the rendering
needed to be improved, and in a few instances passages
whose right to stand in the Bible at all was very doubtful. In such cases I need
hardly say that no amount of sentiment about our grand old Bible should prevent our making
the corrections required.” (Pages 17-18)
In
connection with the Codex Bezae the same author says:
“It is
in many ways a curious and interesting document. It shows part of a very old Greek and a
very old Latin Bible which always do not exactly correspond. It shows traces of the work
of several correctors, some of them very ancient. One can see how the original scribe,
whenever he made a slip, washed it out with a sponge, and how he corrected with a pen
nearly empty of ink. Later correctors scraped out with a knife what seemed to them
incorrect, and so have in some places spoiled the manuscript. But the most curious thing is the daring
interpolations in the text, most of which are entirely unsupported by other
manuscripts. Most of them are probably worthless but yet it is not improbable that some of
them may contain lost sayings and deeds of our Lord, such as St. John refers to in chapter
21:25.” (Page 31).
The above
quotations from the book of a Christian scholar are adequate testimony to our contention
that with so many revisions of the text, the Word of God has become the word of man!
* God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost.